NENA – 99 Luftballons

“99 Luftballons” – Single by Nena from the album “Nena and 99 Luftballons”
Released, March 1983 in West Germany, and in 1984 in United Kingdom.

This was one of the songs in the ’80s to make a point about the brinkmanship and paranoia/hysteria surrounding the Cold War. In the song, Nena and the listener buy 99 red balloons in a shop and let them go, for fun. These balloons show up on military radar as unidentified objects and both sides scramble planes and go to full alert to counteract a perceived nuclear attack, when in fact it is the most childlike of things, a bunch of balloons.

The song, though difficult to understand, is about the dreams of the German people that were lost after World War II. The 99 balloons represent the many dreams each person had. At the end of the song, Nena just wants to prove that the German people did have dreams by finding just one balloon. She does find this one balloon, a dream, and lets it go.

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NENA - 99 Luftballon

NENA | 99 Luftballons (1983) (Offizielles HD Musikvideo)03:55

Nena’s guitarist, Carlo Karges, got the idea for the song at a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin. At one point during the show, the band released a bunch of balloons. Carlo watched as one of those balloons drifted over the wall into East Berlin. He imagined a radar picking up that one balloon and mistaking it for an enemy plane. Carlo wrote the lyric and Nena’s keyboard player, Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, wrote the music.

Nena was born Gabriele Susanne Kerner. She was in a band called The Stripes before forming her own group.

“99 Luftballons” was first released in Nena’s native Germany in 1983. Their record company had no intention of releasing it in America until a disc jockey at the radio station KROQ in Los Angeles found a copy and started playing it. Nena recorded an English version (the original words are in German, and yes, “Captain Kirk” in German is still “Captain Kirk”) with the title translated as “99 Red Balloons” and released it in the US, but most radio stations played the original German version, which was the hit, climbing to #2 on March 3, 1984 (held off the top spot by Van Halen’s “Jump”).

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